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Airbnb Is Borrowing Ideas From Hotel Industry to Build Up Its Inventory

Posted on August 9, 2018 at 8:45 pm

While many in the travel industry might view Airbnb as simply a homesharing platform, or just another online travel agency like Booking and Expedia, the San Francisco-based company is realizing it has to be more than just a marketplace.

A case in point: the Airbnb Friendly Buildings Program, and the new tools for landlords and property managers that it plans to unveil.

These tools will let apartment landlords and building managers have more control over how their residents homeshare, such as setting caps on how often a unit might be rented or including building rules in Airbnb listings.

Airbnb is also working on a new ways to work with systems such as Yardi, RealPage, Appfolio, and Entrata — systems that many property managers already use to manage their residences — to able to manage Airbnb listings as well. It’s similar to a move the company made in 2017 to make it easier for vacation rental property managers to manage their listings on Airbnb.

Together, these changes are meant to make it easier for landlords to take full advantage of Airbnb’s Friendly Buildings Program and, in some ways, they demonstrate to what degree Airbnb is borrowing ideas from the hotel industry to build up its own inventory.

Some Background On The Friendly Buildings Program

When Airbnb launched its Friendly Buildings Program in 2016, it was billed, primarily, as a way for Airbnb to incentivize multifamily housing owners and developers to allow their tenants to rent out their homes on Airbnb — the incentive being that these landlords would also be able to take a cut from whatever money those tenants made from Airbnb.

Since then, it’s evolved from individual buildings of “tens of thousands of units” (Airbnb was not able to confirm an exact number), to facilitating an entire hotel-like brand.